


The drowned face always staring toward the sun

by inlovewithnight



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-21
Updated: 2009-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:47:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from "Diving Into The Wreck," by Adrienne Rich</p>
    </blockquote>





	The drowned face always staring toward the sun

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Diving Into The Wreck," by Adrienne Rich

Jason used to give her nightmares, when she was new to the project. When she was herself. Before his father tripped over her secret and wiped out her will.

_Nightmares_ isn't the right word, she knows. Visions. Hallucinations. Full-scale psychic violations. But _nightmares_ carries a little more punch, more impact.

She thinks in metaphors of violence, now. _Nightmares_ has more meaning.

Jason _used_ to do that, whatever it was called. Used to fuck around in her brain. He doesn't anymore.

He can't tell her mind apart from his own, these days.  
**  
The job is an incredible coup. She's hired even before she finishes her last semester of college, and she's the talk of all of her friends at Stanford those last few weeks. They joke about how she must have caught the General's eye, and she smirks and rolls her eyes and refuses to confirm or deny. She knows that Stryker hired her for her ass in that skirt she wore to the interview; she knew he would and that's why she wore it. But she had earned her degree and she earned the goddamn job. She's proud of herself and she ignores the little voice in the back of her mind, the one whispering that going anywhere near the military is insanity, that she should go home to Arizona and stay there. Be invisible. The only way to be safe is to be invisible.

She's proud and she's cocky and she ignores all of the warning signs. Fuck, the thing is called _the Weapon X project_, that should be enough of a sign for anyone, though she doesn't find that out until she's in too deep and too classified to back out. Its name wasn't in any of the paperwork she read before she signed her name (she read it line by line, the fine print too, she didn't skip or skim), just "classified military projects in the US and abroad."

If she thinks about that at all, she thinks that it means nuclear depots in Iran. Not secret bases in Canada. Does the Canadian government know about the projects at Alkali Lake? Do they care? She never asks.

The facility is an underwater prison and fully sixty percent of its rooms are torture chambers of one kind or another. She never sees the sky. They turn people into living knives and then screaming chunks of meat, all before her eyes.

She holds Stryker's tape recorder while he gives the orders.

She holds his briefcase while he talks to his son.  
**  
Her own skin betrays her. She should have known it would.

She knows the moment she sees the first experiment. Well. She had _known_ it nearly all of her life, that she had to keep her own secret, keep quiet, let them think that she never had skinned knees because she was a nerd.

She gave up soccer and softball; no way to explain how she got up from _every_ hard fall without a bruise. She learned to play the piano, because that was indoors and still and took hours of practice. Her fingernails wore down and grew back as she played, and she could hold that to her heart as a secret well-kept. Hers.

Under the lake, the secret grows critical, hysterical, painful.

One day her thumb slips across the edge of a file as she hands it to Stryker. The cardboard bites in deep, blood staining the papers. She gasps in shock and he hisses in concern and her skin knits up before their eyes.

And that's the end of that.  
**  
They keep her docile the old-fashioned way at first: sedatives by the gallon. Animal sedatives, big-game tranqs, meant for elephants or rhinos so her body won't burn through them too fast to be worth it. They learned that with the other one who survived, the Wolverine.

Stryker doesn't figure out the trick to using Jason's brain for a while, but he's so happy when he does, so goddamn pleased. Since the Wolverine ran away, he hasn't had anything to work with, a subject worth studying. Now he doesn't just have a drugged-up zombie that sleeps most of the time and screams when they make it show its claws.

Now he has something he can _use_.  
**  
She's never been good at metaphors, but she has nothing but time, now, and she comes up with one that works. Not that she will ever be able to tell anybody, but it's something to hold on to, shut away inside her own brain, something that's hers.

Picture a lake, she would say. A big, broad lake, the waters perfectly still. (Maybe she's a little influenced by the fucking dam. She doesn't dwell on that.)

You can't tell from the surface, but the lake is full of corpses, water-bloated bodies hanging heavy and still and gray, trapped in the weeds growing up toward the sun. You can't see them at first, not until you look close, but they're there, ugly and thick with decay.

At the bottom of the center of the lake, under the water and the bodies, is a single pebble. One small stone. From anywhere you could stand, it doesn't exist at all. It might as well not even be there, but it _is_. It's powerless and maybe meaningless but it's _there_.

That's her, trapped and still and waiting, under Stryker's poison and the perfect surface he makes her wear. She can't speak or move or feel, but she can see. She knows. She still exists, even if no one but her captor and his son know that she's there.  
**  
She fights normal humans first, prisoners and mercenaries, off-record people with off-record lives that don't even need to be erased when they're gone. They beat her around badly for a while, even with her superior reflexes, even with her mind wiped clear of everything except the order to fight and the infinitesimal speck that is still herself but can't control anything. It takes time for her body to learn, just like the piano, only here it's her bones that break and grow back.

He calls her the Wildcat, probably for the claws. She doesn't get tags, like they gave the Wolverine; she gets bracelets and chokers, things that it amuses Stryker to see her wear when he dresses her in suits and skirts and has her go back to the job she was originally hired to do.

The suits are still tight and artfully revealing, like she used to choose them to be, but he doesn't look at her anymore. Thank whatever god looks out for brainwashed zombies for small favors. The only thing worse than being groped by Stryker would be if he ordered her to fuck his son, and that won't happen because he's ever so slowly draining Jason's life away through the shunt and into little vials to keep the experiments in line.

She's pretty sure that's funny, that he'll devour his own son to control them, that all of his limits come from indifference and not love. Funny in the sickest possible way. Sick ways are all she has.  
**  
In the real world, she's probably dead.

She doesn't know how many years it's been exactly; her memory didn't go up in a puff of fuck-you like the files say happened to the Wolverine, but it's fuzzy and uncertain about some things, and one of those is measuring time. But it's been a long while, long enough that her friends must have changed their phone numbers a dozen times, forgotten her entirely, moved on.

Long enough that the cat she gave to her cousin when she took this job must've died.

Long enough that if her parents hadn't been told she was dead, they would have caused enough trouble that Stryker would tell them she was dead. He probably went and told them in person. Sat on the couch and sipped ice tea and told her father that she'd been a beautiful girl.

So beautiful that he filled her up with adamantium and decided to keep her forever.  
**  
She watches Stryker torment Xavier.

She watches Jason play with their minds like bugs in a jar.

She follows her orders to torment and play with the blind man, Summers, in one of the little torture rooms tucked away around the dam like secrets. She's an extension of them both, Stryker's hand, Jason's mind. No more a person than a shoe or a glove.

She bends Summers' head back, she scratches deep, she makes him twist and beg for her to stop. She knows that after they give him his dose, there will be orders to play with him more, maybe in other ways, so that his mind can be horrified by what his body does without permission. It's more efficient for that lesson to be taught quickly, firmly, without question.

Stryker knows that Summers will know what he does, and that he'll be horrified, because there are volumes of documents on the process, locked away in the files under the dam. He learned it all from her testing and interrogation, recorded every response an instrument could catch. Summers is an extension of her, here and now, her brain matter flooded with Jason's cerebrospinal fluid. His magic mutant brain juice. His soulless fucking pus-filled mental excrement.

She bends Summers' head back and she hurts him and she wants to tell him that she was real once, she was alive, her favorite color was yellow, she loved raspberries and old-fashioned love songs.  
**  
She faces Wolverine across the room, across the bay where they pumped the adamantium in, and she thinks suddenly that she's facing him across _the cutting-room floor._

It would be funnier if she could share the joke.

She wonders if he remembers her at all, even as a face drifting by in the background of his procedures and training. Probably not. He seems to be more confused and angry than nostalgic. She hopes that will be enough for him to win.

Her body has its orders and what's left of her inside can't do anything, can't pull a punch or move a claw a single millimeter from its target. Her body cuts him halfway to ribbons and she hates him for not being just a little more fucking _lucky_.

Then...he is.

She's grateful to Jason for the first and only time, because submerged in the center of her own mind, she can see herself die, and she knows it, but she doesn't have to feel it.


End file.
